With Michael Jordan's jersey hanging from the Dean Smith Center's rafters and the basketball team a perennial contender for the national championship, basketball is the cornerstone of the university's athletic department.

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Concord is the cornerstone of Kaplan College, Kaplan's ambitious Web university.

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The cornerstone of Robinson's appeal is a Michigan State University study of jury selection in North Carolina in 1994, the time during which Robinson was sentenced, that found prosecutors struck blacks from juries at a rate of more than 2-to-1 compared with whites.

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What a come-down for a cornerstone stalwart of Silicon Valley, which put the dynamic concept of Stanford University as feeding ground for technology greatness on the altar of a business culture that stood at the apex of American industry in the 1970s.

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